Are Western Mountain Towns Ready For The Coming Flames?
Rural sprawl is expanding the "wildland-urban interface." It is elevating the costs and perils of dealing with wildfire, and taxpayers are footing the bill. Part 2 in our ongoing series
Can't happen here? Over Labor Day weekend 2020, the Bridger Foothills Fire started on the edge of Bozeman, swept up and over the crest of the Bridger Mountains then descended on the other side, destroying 68 structures, including 30 homes in a WUI area of Bridger Canyon. Photo courtesy Rob Sisson
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second part of an ongoing series on the serious human and wildlife issues facing communities with high rates of homes and new construction occurring in the Wildlife-Urban Interface or WUI. In Part 1, Mountain Journal Managing Editor Joseph T. O'Connor examined the unprecedented inward population growth that has happened during the last decade in the WUI.
by Todd Wilkinson
Standing on a ridgeline of healthy spruce and fir in Montana—the forest understory uncluttered by deadfall or what some would call "high fuel loads," Mark Kossler looked toward the rise of the Tobacco Root Mountains barely visible behind a veil of thickening smoke. With a herd of Ted Turner’s bison spread out below him on the Flying D Ranch near Bozeman, Montana, Kossler wiped sweat off his brow.
The apocalyptic dusk, tinged purple, was the product of some of the biggest wildfires raging in modern American history two summers ago, casting a pall that drifted in from hundreds of miles away to the west and affecting the hue of sunsets as far as Minneapolis and Chicago to the east.
On this day, health index readings pertaining to air quality suggested that people not spend much time outside recreating or engaging themselves in rigorous activities that would cause their lungs to huff and puff harder breathing in woodsmoke.
Meanwhile, many streams in Montana were under “hoot owl restrictions” meaning the only fishing on some of the state’s storied fly-fishing destinations was allowed in early morning and just before evening. That’s when water temperatures in currents with low flows and low oxygen levels are cool enough so stressed fish caught on a line would not easily die from exhaustion. Yet soon thereafter, fishing on some streams was temporarily halted altogether until the heatwave abated and precipitation returned.
Elsewhere in much of the forested American West, residents had bigger worries than whether they could have fun on public lands or guide paying clients into the outback of Shangri-la in the Northern Rockies.
Some 90 percent of the West at that moment was clenched in the grip of a megadrought that extended into 2022, the effects of which may not be fully abated with heavy snows and rainfall pounding Pacific and mountain states in this winter of 2022-2023. The reservoir capacity in Lake Powell along the lower Colorado River remains at near historic low levels and in Utah, water withdrawals from streams flowing into the Great Salt Lake have left that famous tarn, a signature of the adjacent city of the same name, in danger of vanishing.
The murk confronting Kossler on the Flying D represented its own harbinger. Fortunately, for him, his top of mind concern on the ranch, protected by a conservation easement which limits development forever, was not losing structures. He was strategically trying to determine how many bison and public wildlife could be sustained on pastures parched dry.
Out in southern Oregon, though, the Bootleg Fire had already etched a destructive path. And, in neighboring California, the Dixie Fire loomed as the biggest in the country. Eight of the ten largest fires ever documented in the Golden State’s 170-plus-year history have happened in the last decade alone. Rapidly, the 2021 Dixie rivaled the size of the massive August Complex (a convergence of several different giant blazes) that together burned 1,033,648 acres just a year earlier.
For many people seeking to have a dream life in the forest, it's inconceivable that their home might burn. But building in the WUI, as fire cycles driven by a changing climate speed up, can have traumatic consequences. This photo by Jaden Schaul was taken off of the CZU Lighting Complex wildfire that roared through Boulder Creek, California in August 2020. Photo from Shutterstock ID: 1982189399
Fires that erupt in the middle of nowhere, on public lands that don't have a lot of homes encircling them, have less urgency to be fought. In fact, letting them burn is actually good for rejuvenating landscapes where fires have been suppressed.
During the summer of 2021, hundreds of conflagrations, small and large, were active simultaneously on millions of acres in 12 states. Many were headlined in newspapers by human evacuations and thousands of charred structures—backdropped by water shortages, record-shattering heat, and livestock and crop losses putting many agrarians on the brink of economic disaster.
In Montana, the most formidable blaze was a giant prairie fire that swelled across about 200,000 acres in the vicinity of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Freakishly, in early December of that year, another fire whipped by strong winds roared into the ag community of Denton on the treeless Montana plains, destroying two dozen structures. Note that in the graphics at the bottom of this story Denton was rated as only having a medium risk to wildfire and yet it burned. Bozeman also measures lower in risk yet just a few miles beyond the city limits, in Bridger Canyon, the probability moves into the high category.
Considered together, these are powerful portents, scientists say, of a climate that is warming, signaling the arrival of a “new normal” of uncertainty that has made the challenge of plotting a course forward much more vexing. They are spelled out as consequences of climate change in the multi-part Montana Climate Assessment—recent installments of which have focused on the future impacts to forests, agriculture, water, human health and a 2021 report that focused on the three-state Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
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Mark Kossler can tell you a lot about fires. As the vice president of operations at Turner’s dozen-and-a-half bison ranches in the West, he is a major proponent of regenerative agriculture and fire is a key element. Kossler and colleagues have used fires as stewardship tools to achieve better rangeland health; they've fended off fires, taken action to prevent them, and dealt with blazes that got away. His colleagues in the Southeastern U.S. have lit prescribed burns to enhance the restoration of longleaf pine and wiregrass ecosystems on Turner holdings to benefit species like imperiled red-cockaded woodpeckers and gopher tortoises.
Fires are a creative force that the diversity of nature can't live without, even though humans in increasing numbers believe they can tempt fate in the fire zone.
Involved with ag all his life, Kossler expresses deep sympathy for cattle, sheep and fiber producers left reeling in the West. One thing he makes clear from the very start is that the absolute worst time to ponder the rhyme and reason of flames is after the fact. In the aftermath of an inferno, he says, it is better to be thinking about preparedness for those inevitable fires yet to come rather than dwelling on recriminations or making political hay. The record of rightness is written on the land.
The best strategy, he notes, is to avoid making the mistakes that lead to disaster. An important nexus of learning can be found, he says, in the convergence of ecological science, indigenous wisdom, history, and the failed conviction of humans that we can control all the variables—or, more perilously, to live in defiance of them.
While smokey sunsets like this one falling below the Tobacco Roots west of Bozeman possess a strange beauty, the unhealthy air speaks to how ubiquitous the wildfire menace is even for people who do not live in the WUI. Photo by Todd Wilkinson
The latter, suggests award-winning fire writer Stephen J. Pyne in his insightful book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, includes the conviction that we can build homes in the forest and turn our backs to reality. We cannot dwell in the problematic landscape area known as the Wildland-Urban Interface without risking traumatic consequences. It's no different from earlier times when large numbers of people build homes in river flood plains before local and federal regulations prohibited it.
In areas prone to flooding and along ocean coasts where hurricanes have been racking up a toll, insurance companies in increasing numbers are debating whether they should stop insuring new development and reconstruction of structures lost. There’s a debate in California and elsewhere in the West over whether people who build their homes in fire zones should be denied coverage, which raises questions:
Is building in an area that has a high probability of burning different from planting a dream home or structure beneath the high water mark? Should the public be expected to pay to rescue those who make risky decisions? Should county planning staffs and elected officials be allowing it to happen?
More Americans than ever before are dwelling in the WUI—and it's an acronym that Mountain Journal readers ought to know and become acquainted with because WUI issues also represent the front lines of wild country and humans seeking to tame it. People who build structures next to national forests are hampering the ability of public land managers to adequately look after their resources. As the amount of money earmarked for fighting fires skyrockets, funding available for stewardship of national forests continues to shrink relative to staffing and resource needs.
In the public-land-rich West, almost seven of every 10 dollars in the U.S. Forest Service’s multibillion-dollar operating budget is consumed by firefighting costs, the vast majority aimed at trying to protect homes built in the WUI. This siphons away dollars that could be directed toward critical field operations, including having more rangers in the field, wildlife research, trail maintenance, enforcement of livestock grazing allotments and laws aimed at stopping illegal activities.
A wildfire erupts in the Gros Ventre Mountains near Jackson, Wyoming. Photo courtesy Teton County, Wyoming
Why is the WUI so problematic? The trendlines are stunning. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of new houses built in the WUI topped 40 million, representing 41 percent growth. In many areas of the West the percentage is much higher, notes a 2018 multi-author study led by Volker Radeloff titled "Rapid growth of the US wildland-urban interface raises wildfire risk" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Daunting is that within the perimeter of recent wildfires there were more than 100,000 new houses, and the pattern is expanding. In Greater Yellowstone, that happened with the advent of the Covid pandemic and the popularity of TV shows like “Yellowstone” that caused people to leave the city (or even, ironically, fire-prone areas in other parts of the West) and build their dream homes in forested terrain, believing this region was somehow more immune to wildfire threats.
Many of those who have taken flight from elsewhere, as Joseph T. O'Connor reported in the first part of this series, are urban and suburbanites intent upon “moving back to nature” but confused—and shocked— as to what that really means. A succession of Forest Service chiefs have warned about this growth pattern for years. In a piece titled "Where Your Front Door Meets The Forest," Kaari Carpenter of the Forest Service's fire and aviation office, wrote: "The WUI is the most challenging area of the forest for wildland firefighters to suppress fire. Here fire transitions from trees and brush to homes and vehicles. This transition creates increased risks and costs for all involved."
A huge volume of forested edge terrain is being transformed for the worse—not by fire but by people who move into the forested edge and then "clear out and clean up" the forest, stripping away the many attributes it provides to wildlife—in order to create a defensible space against the approach of fire.
A huge volume of forested edge terrain is being transformed for the worse—not by fire but by people who move into the forested edge and then clear out the forest, stripping away the attributes it provides to wildlife—in order to create a defensible space against the approach of fire.
Counties have been reluctant to impose any planning and regulatory zoning that keeps people from putting up structures in the WUI. Some like ecologist George Wuerthner, editor of the multi-authored book WILDFIRE: A Century of Failed Forest Policy, say that by recommending “fireproofing” of forested properties, counties are incentivizing more people, unsuspecting of the risks, to invade the WUI.
The paradox, Wuerthner says, is that humans want to possess wildness and their own piece of nature, but their attempt to control the variables, or pretend that fire isn’t an important ingredient for wildness, is harming the places they claim to love.
He is hardly alone. “When houses are built close to forests or other types of natural vegetation, they pose two problems related to wildfires. First, there will be more wildfires due to human ignitions,” authors in the Volker Radeloff study wrote. “Second, wildfires that occur will pose a greater risk to lives and homes, they will be hard to fight, and letting natural fires burn becomes impossible.”
Here, one more observation should be shared. It concerns the all-important language of how wildfire and ecology are communicated. Conrad Smith, a professor at Ohio State University, reviewed hundreds of stories written about the Yellowstone fires in 1988. And he found that national print and TV reporters, who flew into the region from urban areas, often possessed a lack of understanding about basic fire ecology. They often invoked words as if describing a war being fought between humans and a nature intent upon doing harm. If reporters aren’t ecologically literate, and if journalists aren’t challenging false narratives, uninformed by science that are spun by politicians and others, he said, then it’s unlikely their readers will be adequately informed.
Is building in an area that has a high probability of burning different from planting a dream home or structure beneath the high water mark? Should the public be expected to pay to rescue those who make risky decisions? Should county planning staffs and elected officials be allowing it to happen?
The Forest Service and other land managers have tried to use industrial logging, forest thinning, domestic livestock grazing and other tools to achieve fuel reduction. Scientific studies and assessments, however, say that "managing" forests by removing trees may slow fires under "normal" burning conditions, but amid extremely dry conditions, when tall grasses are present amid the trees and then flames are whipped by high winds, fires are unstoppable no matter how many humans are deployed or thinning that has been done in forested environs.
From indigenous knowledge forged by fire over millennia to the present, Kossler says that fire, like water, is an earthly element there to be harnessed. When approached with eyes wide open, it can even help modern land stewards stay in the black. Fire helps rejuvenate soils and fire-adapted grasses, it can release nutrients vital to a complicated interwoven tapestry of positive fire effects, and enhance habitat that supports biological diversity. These things don’t happen when fire is suppressed.
Yellowstone National Park, which remains the beating heart of a larger ecosystem that has unrivaled wildlife populations, is a product of fire, and fires there would not be allowed to fulfill their ecological function if the park were peppered with homes or developments apart from the clustered compounds that today serve tourists.
“Fuel reduction” isn’t only a concept that applies to trees. Even “thinned forests” can become incendiary when, following logging operations, brush and grass fed by spring rains and snowmelt still grow tall, Wuerthner and scientists writing in his book say.
Grasses spring forth but then scorching summer temperatures dry out those areas leaving them primed to burn. What gets less attention in the raging political debates is that climate change is rendering old thinking to be out of date. If there’s natural fuel, combined with low moisture, windy condition and lightning or errant human activity providing a spark, places are going to burn—even those that have had “fuel treatments,” i.e., a reduction in tree density.
The costs of firefighting are exploding because more dollars every year are being channeled to save people and structures built in harm’s way. A better strategy than “thinning,” a wide array of experts say, is preventing people from building on the edge of national forests, national parks and BLM lands prone to burning. This would reduce the expectation, expense and needs of taxpayer-subsidized firefighting. What must also be noted here is that study after study shows the homes built in the WUI, in a region like Greater Yellowstone, have huge negative consequences for wildlife.
The costs of firefighting are exploding because more dollars every year are being channeled to save people and structures built in harm’s way. A better strategy than “thinning,” a wide array of experts say, is preventing people from building on the edge of national forests, national parks and BLM lands prone to burning. This would reduce the expectation, expense and needs of taxpayer-subsidized firefighting.
For ranchers and farmers, exurban development has resulted in fragmented landscapes, posing deepening challenges for producers trying to operate at scale. Ecologically speaking, this has also been an issue identified by Dr. Andrew Hansen and colleagues at Montana State University’s Institute on the Environment for decades. Steadily, vital wildlife habitat located along the boundary of public and private lands is unraveling.
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In 2022, the City of Bozeman let out a $130,000 contract to Colorado-based consulting firm Logan Simpson to prepare a first-ever “Gallatin Sensitive Lands Study” that will identify private lands in the Gallatin Valley important to wildlife, clean water and open space. The final product will provide recommendations but be only advisory.
Just as all “open space” is not equal, certainly not so ecologically speaking, so too can “sensitive lands” fall under a generic classification. A farm protected by a conservation easement that exists as an island in a sea of surrounding development is worth far less as wildlife habitat than private land which abuts a national forest and helps support seasonal movement of wildlife between mountain habitat in summer and winter range on a valley floor.
It is unclear if Logan Simpson intends to include a full examination of sensitive lands, within the context of WUI issues since the WUI encompasses many of the most sensitive lands. In light of wildlife concerns and soaring costs associated with rural development, will the Logan Simpson study recommend policies that would prevent or dissuade new subdivisions from sprouting at the edge of the city, county and portions of the Custer Gallatin National Forest that rims Bozeman and the Gallatin Valley?
A 2014 analysis published in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience stated that “the development of houses in the WUI has a cumulative effect on the surrounding natural ecosystem and its wildlife. First, WUI settlement causes habitat loss, which reduces the area available for wildlife and abiotic ecosystem processes and fragments habitats, therefore altering the flow of materials and organisms across the landscape and decreasing its resilience to disturbances.
Second, WUI development increases the magnitude of the human–natural interface and, consequently, promotes diffusion processes, such as the introduction and spread of invasive species, wildfire ignitions, and pollutants from settlements and roads into the surrounding landscape. These processes can have pervasive effects on human lives and property, as well as on plants, wildlife, and ecosystems.”
"WUI development increases the magnitude of the human–natural interface and, consequently, promotes diffusion processes, such as the introduction and spread of invasive species, wildfire ignitions, and pollutants from settlements and roads into the surrounding landscape. These processes can have pervasive effects on human lives and property, as well as on plants, wildlife, and ecosystems.”
The study goes on: “Fires in the WUI pose great threats to human lives and property. However, WUI settlements also affect fire regimes. Where these areas constitute a sufficient amount of wildland fuel load, ignitions are likely, and the adjoining natural areas are at increased risk of wildfires.
Paradoxically, it suggests, WUI development hamstrings professional land managers from using fire treatments to reduce fire danger and/or improve forest ecology. “This is particularly problematic in landscapes that are fire dependent. Fire suppression increases vegetative cover and, therefore, changes habitat characteristics, which, in turn, may alter species composition. The combination of extreme weather events with very high fuel loads due to consistent fire suppression can create extreme fire behavior that increases the risk to humans and wildlife alike. Increased ignition frequencies due to growing human populations can also shorten the fire return interval below the range of natural variability.”
What this means for Greater Yellowstone and some of the most wildfire-vulnerable human areas, such is mentioned at the end of this story, will also be explored in more detail in Part 3 of this series.
In this map from the US Forest Service, reddish areas spell high risk for people dwelling in the WUI.
Landscapes astride of national forests in the West have been of particular WUI concern because high rates of development near them. In the Forest Service’s Northern Region, which in Greater Yellowstone includes the Custer Gallatin and Beaverhead-Deerlodge national forests, 64 percent of the region’s WUI structures and 73.4 percent of the region’s WUI area were located within and around national forests on private land. For the Intermountain Region, which includes national forests in Wyoming, more than half of the regions’ WUI area and houses were within and around national forests. Demographers have noted that rural development in Greater Yellowstone is accelerating.
Most of Bozeman or Jackson, Cody, Livingston, or Ennis does not, obviously, fall inside a dangerous WUI. zone. But Alta, Wyoming, Driggs and Island Park, Idaho, and Big Sky, Montana, do—and more homes are going up every day.
Few in Bozeman can forget the wildfire that started Labor Day weekend in 2020 and raced upslope through the popular “M” hiking area in the Bridger Mountains at the edge of the city. The blaze, which produced a mushroom cloud, then topped the ridge and descended the east side of the mountains, destroying 68 homes and damaging another 11 structures that were built into a WUI section. Exurban and suburban sprawl continues to spread in WUI that ecologists have identified as potential corridors for wildlife between Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. But with every passing year that may prove to be impractical.
Many today are asking: If Bozeman’s expensive sensitive lands study doesn’t possess teeth, then what good is it? The legacy of land use “planning” in the West and Greater Yellowstone region without enforceable zoning has proved to be a costly failure economically and ecologically.
Counties have been forced to contend with skyrocketing costs, imposed upon taxpayers, to foot the bill for expanded firefighting, law enforcement, EMT, road maintenance, schools and other services to remote subdivisions and wildlife is being displaced. Of all new WUI areas in the West, 97 percent involve housing growth in sparsely settled areas, the Voker Radeloff study notes.
"The conditions associated with extreme fire seasons are expected to become much more frequent, with fire occurrence and area burned exceeding that observed in the historical record or reconstructed from paleoproxy records for the past 10,000 years. Even in years without extreme fire events, average annual area burned is projected to increase, and years with no large fires—common until recently—are projected to become increasingly rare.” —Predictions of a peer-reviewed study by prominent ecologists examining the Greater Yellowstone region
Greater Yellowstone has a front row seat to WUI issues because they have been highlighted by the Bozeman-based environmental-economic research firm Headwaters Economics, which has advised federal land managers.
In the western U.S., the average fire season is 84 days longer than in the 1970s, Dr. Kimi Barrett of Headwaters noted in a study the firm released. Between 1985 and 2017, the number of fires classified as severe increased 700 percent. Since 2005, over 90,000 structures have been lost and nearly 2,000 communities have dealt with a wildfire of 100 acres or greater. In the 2018 Camp Fire in California, more than 18,000 structures were destroyed. In 2018, wildfires in the U.S. caused tens of billions of dollars in property loss and unquantifiable levels of human trauma.
Since 2000, 75 percent of western forests have become significantly drier, tied to winnowing snowpacks, less rain and earlier heat waves every year. By the middle of this century, additional fire suppression costs attributed to climate change alone are expected to top $2 billion. Today, notes Barrett, fully half of the West’s population lives in an iteration of the WUI, where 97 percent of all wildfires are human caused.
A published analysis by students at Carleton College found that one in five homes (20 percent) in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is a second home or cabin, compared to one in twenty-five homes (4 percent) on other western private lands. If homes were built in half of the forested areas where private land borders public land, firefighting costs every year could reach $4.5 billion. Residential lots that are built near wildlands take up more than six times the space of homes that are built around away from wildlands.
The authors honed in on Montana and cited data from Headwaters Economics: “Nearly 27 percent of the costs are attributed to trying to protect homes and private property in the WUI (private land near fire-prone public land). Climate change has been shown to be increasing the costs of fighting wildfires statewide. Currently, protecting Montana homes from wildfires costs an average of $27 million every year. This corresponds to an average cost of $8,000 per home to protect. If development of private land in or near fire-prone forests continue, the costs of protecting homes could increase to $40 million a year. If the average summer temperature went up 1°F it would double the costs of protecting homes. The costs of protecting homes could potentially rise to exceed nearly $80 million dollars by 2025 due to the combination of additional development coasts and hotter summers.”
According to the Montana Climate Assessment, “The state of Montana is projected to continue to warm in all geographic locations, seasons, and under all [carbon] emission scenarios through the 21st century. By mid century, Montana temperatures are projected to increase by approximately 4.5 to 6.0 °F depending on the emission scenario. By the end-of-century, Montana temperatures are projected to increase 5.6 to 9.8 °F depending on the emission scenario. These state-level changes are larger than the average changes projected globally and nationally.”
Mountain slopes after a fire in the Northern Rockies that didn't need to be fought because few human structures were in direct danger. Photo courtesy US Forest Service.
There is widespread consensus that strategic forest thinning is essential in strategic areas. It has won support on both sides of the political aisle, among rural people and those who look after public safety on the edge of towns. Several bills now winding their way through Congress would, if passed and signed into law by President Biden, give federal land managers more discretion to swiftly approve forest thinning projects on national forests and BLM lands that have implications not only for grazing allotments but neighboring private properties and communities.
The efforts are not without controversy. Legislation and executive orders coming from the U.S. Department of Agriculture enable forest supervisors to invoke what is called “categorical exclusion” for proposed thinning projects on public land allowing them to be greenlighted with a minimal amount of scrutiny paid to their potential downsides. Seldom has there been comprehensive reflection on the ecological consequences for wildlife, especially sensitive wildlife species, critics say. They claim that thinning becomes a farcical enterprise if it becomes an incentive for facilitating more building construction in the WUI.
A number of environmental groups claim thinning proposals are merely a ruse to provide more wood products to a timber industry. As a stern rebuttal, agency personnel, off the record, and private landowners who dwell in close proximity to public lands say green groups have become so litigious—challenging practically any proposed thinning project in court—that they have caused paralysis, resentment and dangerously dense forests with high fuel loads.
Many county governments in the West and politicians in Congress have been accused of being notoriously unenlightened when it comes to considering the economic and environmental costs of allowing exurban sprawl in the WUI to proliferate.
In Eastern Idaho today, the Caribou-Targhee National Forest is currently entertaining a request from the owners of Grand Targhee Resort to expand its ski operation on public land while, at the same time, the resort wants to build more structures in forested terrain on private land at the base.
There, Jay Pence, Teton Basin district ranger for the Caribou-Targhee, asked Teton County, Idaho planners and commissioners to insist that the resort create a 300-foot setback along the forest edge to protect 28 new proposed cabins from fire danger. However, the leader of an engineering firm doing work for Grand Targhee pushed back, claiming it would amount to a “taking” of private property.
In Idaho, Jay Pence, Teton Basin district ranger for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, asked Teton County, Idaho planners and commissioners to insist that Grand Targhee Resort create a 300-foot setback along the forest edge to protect 28 new proposed cabins from fire danger. However, the leader of an engineering firm doing work for Grand Targhee pushed back, claiming it would amount to a “taking” of private property.
Incredulous, elected officials and citizens in Teton Valley point to what they call hypocrisy—that Grand Targhee rejects taking preemptive action to reduce its fire risk on land it owns, yet it would probably welcome free firefighting services provided by the Forest Service were a fire to erupt on adjacent public lands.
In a story by reporter Billy Arnold for The Jackson Hole News & Guide, the journalist writes: “[Forest Service district ranger] Pence and others called for having conversations about emergency preparedness sooner rather than later. Prevailing winds would push a fire west of the resort into the base area, fire officials said.” Arnold quoted Pence as saying, “If there’s a fire below that resort, residents of the resort would have to shelter in place.”
Ranchers think about fire a lot. Few ranchers build their homes in places susceptible to forest fires. Why is that? Not far from the Jemez Mountains, Ted Turner’s managers have employed forest thinning and prescribed burning to restore some semblance of natural forest and grassland ecotypes on 560,000-acre Vermejo Park Ranch. Some 400,000 acres of the ranch is categorized as timber, but for more than a century the forest was high-graded, meaning that the largest Ponderosa pine were logged, leaving behind a dense concentration of other trees that were of poor quality because of crowding. “Ted’s strategy was to go in there and try to reverse the unhealthy conditions that had taken hold,” Kossler says.
“It’s a long-term play,” Kossler adds. After thinning has occurred, the remaining standing forest is subjected to prescribed burns to clear out woody vegetation, which is necessary to keep fire danger down. On a couple of occasions, prescribed burns were fanned by winds and spread to adjacent lands. “Everyone gives you praise and slaps you on the back until one gets away,” Kossler says.
In California and the Pacific Northwest, winter and spring rainstorms coming in off the Pacific are a mixed blessing. They bring relief from drought in the near term, but when they result in lush grass growth and an abundance of highly flammable vegetation on the landscape. Then, these grasslands need to be continuously trimmed to create defensible spaces.
Ranchers can bring a highly cost-effective tool to reduce grassy fuel loads. That tool is called grazing. More and more, government agencies, including fire departments, have realized the value of enlisting sheep or cattle producers that can truck their animals to locations where ground cover “ladder fuels” like grass and shrubs.
In the Rocky Mountain West, many ranchers readily allow wildlife to use their pastures but they say they need to graze their livestock in summers on public lands so they can operate at scale. It’s a kind of a quid pro quo in that private ranchers provide a lot of important habitat for wildlife. Even environmentalists who lambast ranchers and cattle and sheep grazers cannot deny the fact that during Covid many of those agrarians were approached by developers willing to buy up their properties and convert them to subdivisions.
Nowhere in Greater Yellowstone has it been demonstrated that condos are better than cows; ranchers can constantly fine-tune their stewardship practices to better coexist with wildlife, but when land is converted into subdivisions it permanently removes habitat and often results in suburban or exurbanites who are even less tolerant of certain wildlife species.
Some 30 years ago, Ted Turner, Kossler’s employer, worked voluntarily with The Nature Conservancy to create what was then one of the largest-ever conservation easements attached to the deed of a ranch—the 113,000-acre Flying D just outside of Bozeman. At the time, Turner was chided by a major developer in Big Sky for not developing the ranch as a real estate play. If that had happened, today there might be hundreds of homes and thousands of structures scattered across the Flying D, many located in the trees and requiring another local firefighting force. Forest management options would have been limited if the ranch had become suburbanized.
Some 30 years ago, Ted Turner, Kossler’s employer, worked voluntarily with The Nature Conservancy to create what was then one of the largest-ever conservation easements attached to the deed of a ranch—the 113,000-acre Flying D just outside of Bozeman. At the time, Turner was chided by a major developer in Big Sky for not developing the ranch as a real estate play. If that had happened, today there might be hundreds of homes and thousands of structures scattered across the Flying D, many located in the trees and requiring another local firefighting force. Forest management options would have been limited if the ranch had become suburbanized.
Two decades ago, an outbreak of spruce budworm showed up in the Flying D's forests. Turner worked with ecologists from TNC to put together a strategy for forest thinning—careful strategic removal of trees to create better conditions for not only sabotaging the spruce budworm invasion but preventing a hot scarifying wildfire. It has worked on both counts, according to Kossler. Notably, opening up the canopy and allowing sunlight to reach the understory also has benefitted native plants and yielded better forage for wild elk, mule deer and other native species.
In a WUI coated with homes, such options for maintaining the region’s world’class mammalian biodiversity would have been lost. The Flying D represents a stark counterpoint to nearby Big Sky.
Given the reality of the climate, it’s not a matter of whether to tinker or not, Kossler says, but how to do it intelligently: essentially, where possible, mimicking nature herself. Decades ago when Kossler went to college to study agriculture, he says the emphasis was on what he calls “additive agriculture.” Higher yields were the result of constantly adjusting inputs and chasing slight market fluctuations, rather than heeding what nature was telling him. “I’ve learned to have a fundamental appreciation for soil biology and trying to understand the synergy that springs from it with animals and plants. That holistic view begins with protecting the soil and, if you get that wrong, the system stops functioning.”
Scarification of soils occurs when super hot temperatures essentially destroy seeds in evergreen cones and nutrients the ground contains. It creates hard surfaces that repel regrowth of trees and plants, except for weeds. Massive scorching fires that scarify soils are an indication of a system that is “out of whack,” Kossler says. More important than merely reacting to wildfire is heeding the subtle nuances of how forests and grasses are responding to climate change. What’s definitely not good for perpetuating healthy soils is covering them with subdivisions made of concrete, steel and asphalt.
“Anybody of a certain age remembers stories about the Dust Bowl and other major drought events. Climate change isn’t like flipping a switch for things to suddenly be one way or another. Adaptation is going to involve modifying our thinking in response to changing conditions,” Kossler says while standing amid a thinned, healthy forest on the Flying D and surveying bison that unknowingly serve double duty as fire prevention specialists.
“What we are trying to do is help nurture natural resilience in the land because after we get through this megadrought—and we will—our soils and grasslands and forests can bounce back,” Kossler says. Healthy natural landscapes, he adds, are the foundation to healthy resilient natural and human communities. Development in the WUI challenges that promise.
A tragic, solemn reminder from Paradise: the aftermath of the Camp Fire which swept through Paradise, California and other communities in 2018. With the economic toll pegged at $16.65 billion (with a b), it was called "the most expensive natural disaster in the world during that year in terms of insured losses." At least 18,000 structures were lost in the Camp Fire and 85 people died, many of whom were overwhelmed by the swift advance of flames driven by gale-force winds. Photo by M Yerman/ Shutterstock ID: 1517724701
In recent years, the public has heard government officials and scientists speak of “historic” natural events occurring with increased frequency—things like 2022’s “500-year flood” in Yellowstone and other kinds of “natural disasters” that previously were rare. These are not flukes, those who work in wildfire research say, but portents. The ways of thinking about orderly and predictable forest succession and management, looking centuries ahead as they were taught at forestry schools, are being rendered obsolete.
Researchers working at the intersection between climate and ecology point to trendlines that should be of interest to anyone dwelling or planning new developments in Greater Yellowstone, especially those within the WUI.
Dr. Monica Turner, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been part of several important studies in the wake of Yellowstone’s historic 1988 fires. She also has had a senior role in several important recent analyses. Major fire frequency that over the last 10,000 years, she told me, used to happen every 100 to 300 years in Greater Yellowstone forests—and with fire intervals of between 75 and 100 years at lower elevations. But the windows between such events are narrowing.
Instead of occurring every one to three centuries, big fires are happening every 30 years or less and at a regional scale. Evergreen forests that evolved in western landscapes are less likely to be replaced. There may be fewer epic fires but a lot more smaller ones. Their regularity is likely to prevent tree species from taking hold (and which have supported forest biodiversity); instead replaced by grasses and shrub brush that also will burn during longer fire seasons.
“The predicted new fire regime would transform the flora, fauna and ecosystem processes in this landscape and may indicate similar changes of other subalpine forests,” fire researchers note in one study.
Scientists share a sobering thought. Computer modeling and ongoing analysis of changing conditions suggest that a large percentage of Greater Yellowstone’s forested landscape by the middle of this century—just 30 years from now—has a high probability of burning, researchers say. This means structures now in the forested environs of the WUI and new structures being approved by county and city planners are going to be at even higher risk of burning.
In recent years, rural development has been greenlighted—and it has accelerated—in Greater Yellowstone at a time of relative climate calm but that is changing now right before our eyes.
Rather than heeding caution, some ski resorts like Grand Targhee have pressed the Forest Service to allow their private operations to expand on public land. Simultaneously, developers in many corners of Greater Yellowstone have adopted a modern wild West approach to real estate speculation that has resulted in a lot of homes (many of them expensive, opulent structures) to be built in fire-prone mountain zones of the WUI next to national forests. Another Headwaters’ study noted that the most significant WUI growth occurred in fast-growing Madison County (580 percent growth in high hazard areas) and Gallatin County (367 percent growth in high hazard areas). Both of those county figures include Big Sky..
Is there is a tacit ironic expectation from those who want government to stay out of their lives to also have federal agencies like the Forest Service come to their rescue to save their structures through taxpayer-subsidized firefighting? Just as no residential subdivision sweeping across critical wildlife winter range never go away, neither do homes constructed in the WUI—unless they burn. The vexing problem is how to address wildfire danger for structures that are already there but do it in a way that does not harm the forest or encourage more buildings.
“No attempt should be made to ‘fireproof’ the forest landscape,” wrote Dr. Thomas Power, a longtime, now retired professor at the University of Montana who was one of the foremost ecological-economists in the country. “We should allow wildfires to burn in our forests. The focus should be on reducing the possible damage caused by those fires. Homeowners should be fireproofing their homes and homesites. Forest ecosystems should not be harmed because homeowners have not taken the necessary safety measures needed where fire is a common and natural occurrence. Education, incentives from insurance companies, and local building codes and land use regulations should be used to shift home protection costs from the public and the surrounding natural forests to the homeowners themselves." In Greater Yellowstone, one of the most glaring examples of a community at "very high risk" of burning and having a chaotic approach to land use use planning, is Big Sky and adjacent gated communities in the Madison Mountain Range southwest of Bozeman. There, the human footprint of structures in sloping forested terrain has ballooned in recent decades. Big Sky resides in a kind of natural geological cul-de-sac with one way into the valley from the east and a single alternative route of escape, the Jack Creek Road, that serves as a western back door leading into the Madison Valley. Jack Creek is normally closed to public access but would be opened to facilitate an evacuation involving thousands of people. The Big Sky area is home to billions of dollars' worth of real estate.
In Greater Yellowstone, one of the most glaring examples of a community at "very high risk" of burning and having a chaotic approach to land use planning, is Big Sky and adjacent gated communities in the Madison Mountain Range southwest of Bozeman. There, the human footprint of structures in sloping forested terrain has ballooned in recent decades. Big Sky resides in a kind of natural geological cul-de-sac with one main way into the valley from the east and a single alternative route of escape, the Jack Creek Road.
Not long ago, the US Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service created a site where citizens can plug in the name of their town and see how it stands in terms of wildfire danger. Within the Greater Yellowstone region, Cooke City, Montana, located near the northeast entrance to Yellowstone; Driggs, Idaho on the west side of the Tetons; Big Sky; Lakeview in the Centennial Valley of Montana; Bondurant, Wyoming, between Jackson and Pinedale; he Jackson Hole enclave of Kelly, Wyoming; Fort Washakie on the Wind River Indian Reservation; Emigrant, Montana in Paradise Valley; Bridger Canyon near Bozeman; Crowheart on the Wind River Indian Reservation; Alta, Wyoming (home of Grand Targhee Resort) also on the west side of the Tetons; Daniel, Wyoming; and the Yellowstone gateway town of Gardiner, Montana were rated at “very high risk of wildlife”—higher than the vast majority of communities in the Lower 48. Although not located in Greater Yellowstone, the ski resort town of Sundance in Utah's Wasatch Mountains was among the highest in the West. See the four factors considered by wildfire experts in the assessment of each community below.
Whenever ecologists, land managers and emergency officials discuss wildfire, always prominently mentioned is location, location, location. Fire regimes in the Northern Rockies are shifting “and the tempo of change” is quickening, scientists noted in a study. “The conditions associated with extreme fire seasons are expected to become much more frequent, with fire occurrence and area burned exceeding that observed in the historical record or reconstructed from paleoproxy records for the past 10,000 years,” they write. “Even in years without extreme fire events, average annual area burned is projected to increase, and years with no large fires—common until recently—are projected to become increasingly rare.”
This graphic prepared by the US Department of Agriculture and US Forest Service shows that Big Sky ranks at the high end of the scale in terms of wildfire likelihood based on a number of factors.
The "fire problem," says Dennis Glick, who worked as the first private land conservation specialist for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and then had leadership roles with the Sonoran Institute and, most recently, Future West, is really a problem rooted in human behavior. In the book WILDFIRE, Glick and co-author Crystal Stanionis contributed a chapter, "Sprawling Into Disaster: The Growing Impact of Rural Residential Development on Wildland Fire Management in the Greater Yellowstone Area."
Glick and Stanionis called for adding a new term to the lexicon surrounding WUI issues: the "fire plain" which, similar to a flood plain, speaks to areas where sprawl should not happen as a way to prevent human loss of life and other disasters. "Communities in ecologically important settings, such as those at the edge of national parks and national forests, should develop conservation plans that identify and prioritize important natural resources, including keystone ecological processes and critical wild habitats," they write. "These documents should identify for protection or special treatment hazardous areas such as the fire-prone WUI, floodplains, steep slopes, and so forth. Such conservation plans should become an important part of all planning efforts, including efforts pertaining to land use, transportation, and capital improvement (infrastructure). Development projects should be integrated into these conservation plans, avoiding construction in hazardous or ecologically important areas."
Counties have an array of growth management tools to dissuade development in the WUI, Glick and Stanionis say, but they are seldom employed. "A major paradigm shift is needed among public and private firefighting and land management agencies, as well as among local government officials, rural landowners, and insurance companies," they state.
Is it wise for governments to keep allowing people to move into the burn zone with the evidence clear of what is coming? Are communities in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies aware of what the consequences of WUI development are for the wallets of their citizens, the health of wildlife and public lands, and the trauma of dealing with potentially deadly fire events? Who should be held to account if they are not?
POSTNOTE: Portions of this story previously appeared in a piece by Todd Wilkinson written for On Land magazine, the journal of the Western Landowners Alliance. Visit them by clicking here. Next, in Part 3 of this series, Mountain Journal Managing Editor Joseph T. O'Connor will look at the WUI risks in the mountain hamlet of Big Sky considered to be at "very high risk" for wildfire. If you have a few extra moments, scroll down and see how the level of wildfire risk assigned to towns in Greater Yellowstone and the interior West.
WUI Communities Most At Risk To Fire In The Greater Yellowstone Region
Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain Journal, is author of the book Ripple Effects: How to Save Yellowstone and American's Most Iconic Wildlife Ecosystem. Wilkinson has been writing about Greater Yellowstone for 35 years and is a correspondent to publications ranging from National Geographic to The Guardian. He is author of several books on topics as diverse as scientific whistleblowers and Ted Turner, and a book about the harrowing story of Jackson Hole grizzly mother 399, the most famous bear in the world which features photographs by Thomas Mangelsen. For more information on Wilkinson, click here. (Photo by David J Swift).
